Money
14 items from the daily postsFunding rounds, valuations, acquisitions and the earnings calls that mention physician labor. Each item links to the day it ran and to its original source.
- Money Sept 28, 2026Colorado's Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, the state Medicaid agency, announced $169,587,181 in Rural Health Transformation Program grants on Sept. 28 for about 250 projects in 52 rural or frontier counties and three rural census tract counties. The program is the $50 billion federal fund for rural health that CMS is distributing to all 50 states, and Colorado's first-year federal allotment is $200.1 million, the state said. The state listed tele-ICU, telehospitalist services, remote patient monitoring, regional telehealth networks, electronic health record updates, shared technology platforms and digital health tools among the funded work, and CMS's release added telemedicine in ICUs and inpatient settings, mobile clinics and prehospital whole-blood transfusion training for EMS in 39 counties. The state received 112 eligible applications seeking more than $250 million for 368 projects. "These RHTP awards are a direct investment in rural resiliency," said Michelle Mills, chief executive of the Colorado Rural Health Center. Neither release names an AI project, and the state said the full awardee list is on its program page.
- Money Sept 28, 2026Vendors of hospital coding software rejected the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association's conclusion, reported in this site's Sept. 25 post, that AI-assisted billing raised inpatient costs without a matching rise in treatment, according to Healthcare Dive. "If patients are truly sicker, we'd expect to see more treatment," Luke Chalker, the association's senior vice president of product and data science, said, citing more anemia diagnoses without more transfusions. Dr. Travis Bias of Solventum, whose coding products Healthcare Dive said are used by more than 80% of U.S. hospitals, said the cause is fee-for-service payment: "we pay for volume, not for value." Hamid Tabatabaie, chief executive of CodaMetrix, which serves more than 500 hospitals, said hospitals not using such systems had been missing billable services. TechCrunch reported that Abridge founder Dr. Shiv Rao described competing automated systems on both sides of claims as a possible "horrible dystopic future."
- Money Sept 25, 2026The offering of 50 million shares at $40 to $44 was about four times oversubscribed, Bloomberg reported Sept. 25. Pricing is set for Sept. 29, with trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol OURA. The company is selling 13.5 million shares, and existing holders including Forerunner Ventures and Lifeline Ventures are selling 36.5 million. The top of the range values Oura at $14.1 billion, or about $15 billion fully diluted, and the deal would raise up to $2.2 billion, according to the report. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Allen & Co. and Jefferies are the underwriters.
- Money Sept 24, 2026The platform reads referrals arriving by fax, portal or EHR, checks them against facility clinical and payer criteria, and handles admissions, benefits checks and prior authorization, the company said Sept. 24. At Lifepoint Health it cut median referral processing time to 1.2 minutes from 8.5, according to the company, which plans to expand to 49 more Lifepoint markets and 62 ScionHealth hospitals by the end of 2026. Frist Cressey Ventures and 25m Health also invested.
- Money Sept 23, 2026About 75% of provider organizations described themselves as optimistic or highly optimistic about AI, and about 60% of payers said call center AI investments met or exceeded return expectations, according to the survey released Sept. 23. About 80% of providers and payers have AI strategies in place or in development. "Tangible, measurable outcomes are becoming increasingly important as providers and payers' AI strategies mature," KLAS Research CEO Adam Gale said.
- Money Sept 25, 2026OpenEvidence raised $250 million at a $15 billion valuation in a round with Andreessen Horowitz and hospital systems, Axios reported Friday, citing Business Insider. The company was valued at $12 billion in January, according to Refresh Miami. Chief Executive Daniel Nadler told Forbes this month that the company plans to use data from Memorial Sloan Kettering and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network to develop its own pipeline of therapies, with a first drug in clinical trials before year-end and three to five more candidates next year.
- Money Sept 24, 2026The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, whose 31 independent plans cover more than 100 million people, attributed $653 million of the total to secondary diagnoses that moved about 55,000 additional cases into higher-paying diagnosis-related groups, at an average of about $11,000 per case, Fierce Healthcare reported. Hospitals with the highest coding complexity showed similar or lower ICU use, transfusion, reoperation and length of stay than peers; top-quartile hospitals diagnosed anemia 38% more often than peers but transfused less, 16.9% against 19.3%, according to Becker's Hospital Review. "The likelihood that this is technology-enabled upcoding is higher, in my view," said Dr. Razia Hashmi, the association's vice president of clinical affairs. The American Hospital Association said inpatients are older and sicker and cited a roughly 5% rise in case-mix index from 2019 to 2024, Medical Daily reported. The analysis is the insurers' own and names ambient scribes among the tools that surface secondary diagnoses, PYMNTS reported. Health system leaders told Becker's that payers have automated claim review and denials at a scale hospitals cannot match.
- Money Sept 22, 2026The round is a $100 million Series C led by Blackbird with Phoenix Court, Point72 Private Investments and Headline, plus $240 million of growth financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, at a $900 million valuation, MobiHealthNews reported. The company's own figures, reported by HIT Consultant, are 2.8 million visits a week, 175 million visits supported in total, 67 million clinical hours, annual recurring revenue of $50 million by April and a 62% enterprise activation rate, all unaudited; Heidi's media page had not posted the announcement as of publication, and the figures come from the trade press. Thomas Kelly, the company's chief executive, said the ambition was "always bigger than writing doctor's notes," and the roadmap is agents that prepopulate order sets, draft referrals and assemble the pre-visit record, with the clinician approving before anything executes. SiliconANGLE listed the products already shipped, including an evidence tool the company said has answered 10 million queries since March, and named Beth Israel Lahey Health and NHS England's Midlands region as customers. This site reported Monday that Heidi's Asia-Pacific medical officer said 83% of the clinicians the company surveyed use AI with no employer policy.
- Money Sept 21, 2026The offering consists of 13.5 million shares from the company and 36.5 million from existing holders, listed on the Nasdaq under the symbol OURA, with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan leading; at the midpoint of the range the deal would total about $2.1 billion, less than the $3 billion at a valuation above $16 billion that Bloomberg reported in August. The S-1 shows 5.0 million paid members at June 30, revenue of $1.21 billion in the nine months to June 30, up 74% (hardware $974 million; membership $240 million, up from $109 million) and year-to-date net income of $60.8 million; Fierce Healthcare reported the member demographics, about 72% women and 27% over 45. The filing describes an AI health companion, Oura Advisor, and custom health LLMs, and states that the company markets certain of its products and features as general wellness products that it believes are not actively subject to FDA device rules. The filing mentions Oura's partnership with Counsel Health, whose physicians Oura has offered its members since May, and mentions Medicare Advantage; it does not mention ACCESS, the Medicare program Counsel said on Sept. 17 it had joined. Correction (Sept. 28): This item and the post's summary have been corrected. An earlier version said the prospectus does not mention Counsel Health or Medicare, that Oura members could reach Counsel's physicians from Sept. 17 and that membership revenue rose 74%. The prospectus mentions the Counsel partnership and Medicare Advantage but not ACCESS, the partnership began in May, and 74% is the growth in total revenue.
- Money Sept 19, 2026The panel met Sept. 17 to 19, the last meeting of the cycle that produces the 2028 code set, with 94 tabs on the agenda: 49 Category I proposals, 40 Category III proposals and a handful of guideline changes. Seven of the 94 describe AI services, four of them seeking permanent codes: quantitative MRI software for liver tissue composition (Tab 36), augmentative arrhythmia analysis from computational cardiac simulations (Tab 46), noninvasive measurement of left ventricular end-diastolic pressure to detect heart failure (Tab 48) and electrical impedance spectroscopy of skin lesions (Tab 49). The other three seek Category III codes: augmentative algorithmic analysis of digitized prostate slides (Tab 68), augmentative breast cancer risk prediction from screening mammograms (Tab 82) and noninvasive identification of ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) and its equivalents (Tab 84). Tab 94 would rewrite the pathology and laboratory code application to ask about software and its validation, which Madhani Healthcare Consulting and the Discoveries in Health Policy blog both flagged as the AI change that will outlast any single code. The AMA's Appendix S taxonomy, updated the day the meeting opened, supplies the vocabulary: assistive software provides data, augmentative software provides a score or parameter and autonomous software makes the interpretation itself. Three of the seven proposals are labeled augmentative in the agenda, and none is labeled autonomous. The votes are not yet public; the panel publishes a summary of its actions weeks after it meets. Whether Medicare pays for any code the panel accepts would be decided in the 2028 fee schedule.
- Money Sept 18, 2026Angle Health's round, announced Sept. 18, consists of $200 million in new Series C funding and a $400 million tender that lets earlier holders sell, led by Vitruvian Partners with Town Hall Ventures joining Blumberg, Portage, PruVen and Y Combinator; the valuation has more than doubled since December. The company reported more than 5,000 employer groups in 47 states, about $1 billion in annualized premium equivalents, revenue up 120% year over year, four straight quarters of profit and median renewal increases of 5% to 7% against an 18% small-business average, all company figures. The AI operates on the payer side: algorithmic underwriting that replaces actuarial review, quoting engines that produce a plan in minutes and "automated clinical steering" for specialty drugs, home infusion and imaging. When a physician orders an MRI for a member, the plan's software rather than a person selects the site the plan prefers and the price it will pay. The $2.7 billion valuation comes as state laws and Connecticut plan rules reported this week seek to keep a person in the loop on denials; steering is not a denial.
- Money Sept 16, 2026Sword Health said in a Sept. 16 release that the deal is all cash and should close at the start of the fourth quarter; the release does not give a price, and the figure of up to $300 million comes from the trade press. Headspace was valued at $3 billion when it merged with Ginger in 2021. Sword, a virtual physical-therapy company valued at about $4 billion, said it has treated more than 1 million people with what it calls AI Care and serves 2,500 organizations; Headspace brings a 15,000-provider network, 84 peer-reviewed studies and 20,000 employer clients, according to the companies' own figures. Headspace's chief executive described the target model as one that "brings in a human clinician when it is needed." Headspace is also an accepted participant in Medicare's ACCESS behavioral health track, which pays for technology-enabled care of depression and anxiety based on outcomes.
- Money Sept 15, 2026OpenEvidence, free to clinicians and ad-supported, is valued at $12 billion; in July it considered, then shelved, a round at a $20 billion valuation. Function Health, which sells a $365-a-year lab bundle, raised another $450 million in July. Oura filed to go public in September with $1.4 billion in trailing revenue. Doximity's shares rose by roughly two-thirds after it said its AI scribe users grew tenfold. Waystar, which sells billing software, hired bankers to explore a sale after investors concluded AI would displace its business.
- Money Sept 15, 2026Waystar, a revenue-cycle software company used by hospitals and physician groups for billing and claims, has retained Evercore to run a sale process that is at an early stage and could still stall, Reuters reported. Shares are down 24% this year after a July Morgan Stanley note argued AI could disrupt software companies. EQT holds 13% of the company, CPP Investments 10% and BlackRock 8%. Waystar went public at $20 a share in 2024 and peaked at $45 in 2025. The company has said AI drives 40% of its bookings.